Hebrew orthography includes three types of diacritics: niqqud (vowel pointing), cantillation marks (te'amim, used for chanting biblical passages), and geresh/gershayim (used for numerals, acronyms, and loanword sounds).
Niqqud (נִקּוּד) — meaning "dotting" or "pointing" — is a system of small dots and dashes placed above, below, or inside Hebrew letters to indicate vowels. Since Hebrew script is primarily consonantal, niqqud disambiguates pronunciation. In modern Israeli Hebrew, niqqud is seldom used in everyday writing (newspapers, books, websites) but appears in dictionaries, poetry, children's literature, and texts for new immigrants. Israeli Hebrew has five vowel phonemes (/i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/) but many more written niqqud symbols, including: Hiriq (ִ), Tzere (ֵ), Segol (ֶ), Patach (ַ), Kamatz (ָ), Holam (ֹ), Shuruk (וּ), Kubutz (ֻ), and Shva (ְ). Reduced (hataf) variants exist for segol, patach, and kamatz. The dagesh (ּ) is a dot placed inside a consonant to mark gemination (doubling) or to distinguish plosive from fricative articulation. The rafe (ֿ) marks fricative consonants but is no longer used in modern printed Hebrew.
Cantillation marks (te'amim, טעמים) — also called trop or trope — are used exclusively for chanting ritual readings from the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) in Jewish prayer. They are notated in the Masoretic Text alongside the vowel points and serve both a musical (chanting) and a syntactic (punctuation-like) function, indicating pauses, connections, and stress.
Geresh (׳) — a mark resembling an apostrophe — is used as a diacritic combined with consonants to represent non-native sounds: e.g., ג׳ for /dʒ/ (as in "age"), ז׳ for /ʒ/ (as in "vision"), צ׳ for /tʃ/ (as in "change"), and others for transliterating foreign phonemes like /ð/, /θ/, /w/, and /χ/. Geresh also marks Hebrew numerals and initialisms.
Gershayim (״) — a double-geresh mark — is placed between the penultimate and last letters to denote acronyms, alphabetic numerals, names of Hebrew letters, and linguistic roots.
Meteg — a small vertical bar placed below a character next to niqqud — marks vowel length and secondary stress.
History: Several diacritical systems were developed in the Early Middle Ages. The most widespread, and the only one still used significantly today, was created by the Masoretes of Tiberias in the second half of the first millennium CE in the Land of Israel (see Masoretic Text, Tiberian Hebrew). The niqqud signs and cantillation marks are small compared to consonants, allowing them to be added to existing consonantal texts without retranscription.
Notable fact: Torah scrolls used in Jewish synagogue liturgy contain no diacritical marks whatsoever — only the consonantal letters. It is expected that the reader knows the correct pronunciation and intonation from memory or study.
